3CLogic's Contact Center Blog

An article about contact center trends recently caught my eye. The article, found here at Nearshore Americas: The Eight Most Influential Contact Center Trends, hones in on eight contact center trends for 2014. However, I would like to focus on the six trends that I believe are most important.

The first trend in the article is fitting in the cloud. Many contact centers have already moved to the cloud by using software solutions, but most are still premise-based. The cloud provides huge advantages for contact centers including scalability and speed of deployment. Security and reliability were once liabilities, but are becoming stronger on the cloud. Small and medium sized businesses are expected to move to the cloud. However, as the article states, large outsourced call centers will probably not make the change just yet.

In recent years, I feel as though my customer service expectations have risen tremendously. I am not completely sure why this is the case, but I know it has something to do with the technological advancements that our society has made. So many companies used to be able to get away with poor customer service because it was difficult for their customers to research them before hand, and harder for them to make the switch to a different company. Now, marketing is a two-way street; customers can post reviews on Facebook, Angie’s List, blogs and twitter regarding their experiences with companies. These customers can now project their opinions to thousands of people, if not more, and speak either highly or poorly of the companies with which they are doing business. Also, switching companies is now a matter of a quick and easy phone call. Companies can no longer get away with cutting any corners, and it has become a priority for many to re-vamp their customer service departments to ensure that they will not be brought down by negative reviews.

Coming off of a brief beach vacation from work, I’m feeling pretty nautical. Of course, now that I’m back at my desk, I feel flooded by the tide of emails that have come into my inbox.

In the past few years, you may have noticed a change in the telecom industry. Contact center has replaced call center in industry jargon when discussing the type of business you run. Why? Because the customer of today wants to experience customer service that makes them feel special, but they want to be able to do it on their own time.